The Daily Stoic - Why Aren’t You Virtue Signaling? | Not Good, Nor Bad

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

Ryan discusses the paradoxical nature of our cultures negative view of virtue signaling, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.List your product on AppSumo between September 15th - November 17th and the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1000, the next 2000 to list a product get $250. And everyone who lists gets entered to be one of 10 lucky winners of $10k! Go to https://appsumo.com/ryanholiday to list your product today and cash in on this amazing deal.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epipetus Markus, really a Seneca, then some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target,

the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion-forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why aren't you virtue signaling? It's become kind of a reactionary refrain popular on social media and internet comments sections. We see someone talking about a social cause. We hear someone concerned about something going on in the world.

We watch someone trying to do some good and we pounce virtue signaling. We spit the words out like venom. We type them out on our keyboards with a little extra force. We shout them at their perpetrators as if it means something. Now, of course, virtue signaling does exist. It's true. In violation of the course to a practice of showing rather than telling, some people would rather talk about what a good man is like, instead of, you know, being one. Yet in a world filled with so much injustice and blatant shamelessness, this also seems like a rather silly thing to be upset about, because isn't the one thing worse than virtue signaling the outright rejection of virtue altogether?

Now certainly, Senaqa could be accused of virtue signaling. He was a public figure and an admired stoic who wrote beautiful philosophical essays, but whose conduct often fell short of the principles explored in those various essays. Senaika was ambitious. He liked worldly things. He made pragmatic compromises.

But again, isn't this better than the alternative? Isn't pragmatism preferable to pure evil? Does anyone really prefer Neuros approach? Virtue signaling we might say is necessary, but not sufficient for the virtuous life. We begin with a commitment to virtue, an earnest commitment to doing the right thing, to serving the common good, to philosophical ideals.

Will we always be consistent with it? Always live up to our own standards? We can try. But almost certainly we will fall short. We also have to understand that this is true for others. Virtue is hard. Stoicism is a tough prescription. Getting our heart in the right place is a good first step. And then with time, with practice, hopefully we get better at it. Judging other people for falling short, for talking more than acting, then dismissing virtue altogether as a result, equating it with phoniness or naivete because apparently signaling about virtue

is worse than doing nothing at all. What does that accomplish? So send your virtue signals. Just make sure you're actually backing them up and leave others to their own struggle to do the same or better yet. Help them back it up rather than backing them into a corner for daring to wish out loud for a better world. Not good nor bad. Shout out to my wife Samantha. It is her birthday today. I'm recording this in advance. It's not technically today. Who knows what we'll be doing. I'm probably going to take the day off, spend some time together. But in the meantime, I'll give you the entry. There is no evil in things changing. Just as there is no good in persisting in a new state. Marcus

Areleus is 442 and I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic 366 meditations on wisdom perseverance in the art of living by yours truly. My co-author and translator, Steve Enhancelman, you can get signed copies by the way in the Daily Stoke store, over a million copies of the Daily Stoke in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the best cellist. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoke.com as well.

But let's get on with today's reading. Now, what I wanted to do there, just because I sometimes find value in checking the other translations, let's look at what Gregory Hayes has to say today. There is nothing bad in undergoing change. This is from the Gregory Hayes translation, or good in emerging from it. So what does that mean exactly? When people say change is good, they're usually trying to reassure someone or themselves. Because instinctively we view change as bad, or at least we're suspicious of it.

But the Stoics want you to do away with those labels altogether. Change isn't good, status quo isn't bad, they just are. They just are. Remember events are objective. It's only our opinion that says something is good or bad. And thus worth fighting against or fighting for. A better attitude to decide, to make the most of everything, but to do that, you must first cease fighting.

And I think I put this together. I was giving a talk in some industry. It was oil and gas maybe several years ago. And that industry was particularly struggling or going through a hard time. And they wanted me to talk about that. And I said, is this a great time to be in your industry or a bad time?

Is it a terrible time to be in this space or a wonderful time? I said, you know what? Doesn't fucking matter. Because you're in it right now, right? These opinions, is it a bear market? Is it a bull market? Are we in the decline of America? Is it the collapse of the world order? Right? We speculate about these things. We want to put labels on them. We want to place them somewhere in a story as if it matters, as if it changes what is in fact happening. It's not things that upset us, Epictetus says, but our judgment about things. So why don't we try to step back and just

not label them at all? Remember Marcus Realis also says, we always have the power to have no opinion, to think nothing at all, to just simply let it be and get to work, either accepting it, coming to terms with it, or working on changing it. I don't want you to think that by not labeling things, we become apathetic. In fact, Saul Olinsky, who I love, and if you just got triggered by that name, is exactly what I'm talking about. Saul Olinsky says that an organizer, an agent of change, has to accept the world as it is for what it is if they wish to change it.

So this idea of acceptance, not seeing it as evil, but also not seeing it as permanent, not seeing it as ordained, not seeing it as malicious, just seeing it as what it is then allows you to allocate those resources towards what is in your control. When Mark really says, why should we be angry at the world as if the world would notice? I think he's saying, the world doesn't care what labels you put on it. The market doesn't care that we call this a bear market and this a bull market. Doesn't know what any of those things is. What any of those things are, it is not sentient. The labels don't matter, right? The names are nothing. They just, they don't affect what it is. What we do, how we respond, how we integrate it,

the changes we make because of it. Now, that has some impact. So, there is no evil in things changing, just as there is no good and persistent in a new state. Change isn't bad, it isn't to be afraid of. It's also not good, just is. Change is a fact of life. We must accept it, we must anticipate it,

we must utilize it, because that's all that we control. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. You just go to dailystoke.com slash email. So check it out at dailystoke.com slash email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music,

download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Hey there listeners! While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well

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